FrightFest review – Redux Redux

FrightFest review – Redux Redux

Kevin and Matthew McManus – who bill themselves as The McManus Brothers – directed the very interesting The Block Island Sound.  In Redux Redux, they build a film around Michaela McManus – their talented actress sister – with significant if smaller roles for indie genre icons Jeremy Holm (The Ranger, Black Mold, Brooklyn 45, Herd) and Jim Cummings (Thunder Road, The Beta Test, The Wolf of Snow Hollow).

It’s a multiverse-travelling saga.  Irene Kelly visits an endless stream of only fractionally differing timelines in a coffin-shaped gadget, to track down and kill Neville (Holm), a diner cook serial killer who has murdered her daughter in her home reality (code-named 00) and it seems done the same in every permutation she visits.  The revenge differs in difficulty and location and isn’t bringing Irene any satisfaction, even as she repeatedly hooks up with variations on one decent guy (Cummings) at a grief counselling self-help group … until on her umpteenth invasion of the killer’s lair (she’s up in the thousands) she finds spiky fourteen-year-old runaway Mia (Stella Marcus) with her wrists zip-tied.  She has never found her daughter alive in any continuum but this rescued waif – not the easiest person to get on with – becomes something like a surrogate, though she’s also disturbingly eager to climb aboard the reality-travelling revenge train and become an apprentice avenger.

Does killing the same person multiple times make Irene a serial killer too?  She certainly has to evade the law in multiple universes, and even has an uneasy encounter with some lowlifes who are also travelling between realities.  The hook of the film is its concept, which is actually more relatable in melodrama terms than the quests of Everything Everywhere All at Once and Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, but the heart is in Irene’s shifting relationship with Mia, with McManus and Marcus both giving terrific performances as tough-hided characters who open up, perhaps disastrously, to the possibility of a new relationship despite being living proof of the same shit happening over and over again in any imaginable reality.

Here’s the FrightFest listing.